Halachic Approaches to the Role of Prayer in Evidence Based Medicine

Frank Lieberman, MD, Professor of Neurology and Medical Oncology, University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine

This presentation examines prayer for healing from the perspective of both the physician and patient in the writings of modern as well as historically important rabbinic scholars. There is an especially rich corpus of writings addressing the role of the physician, the place of prayer within the religious obligations to visit and confort the sick, and the goals of prayer for the supplicant. Prayer is viewed as an integral component of the design of the physical word and therefore not in conflict with mechanistic understandings of pathophysiology of disease nor with evidence based scientific treatments. The long tradition of rabbinic authorities, especially but not limited to the communities in medieval Europe, also being practicing physicians produced a number of approaches to understanding what we are praying for when we pray for healing. The different viewpoints range from the approach which minimize the role of scientific medicine and view natural law as an illusion, to the vision that prayer for the healing is fundamentally asking for divine guidance in the physician’s implementation of scientific knowledge. In an examination of the teachings of Maimonides,Shalom Arush, Rabbi Joseph Soleveitchik, Rabbi Abraham Twersky, and Rabbi Shimshon Dovid Pincus, and Rabbi Yisroel Miller, we can develop a perspective in which prayer is an integral part of the experience of illness and the practice of medicine, which empowers both the patient and the physician. This perspective also addresses the theological understanding of the potency of prayer and the experience of suffering in situations in which the outcome is not the physical recovery of the patient. These insights express themselves both in the codification of Jewish religious law regarding the obligation for prayer on the part of the patient and in the practice of visiting and comforting the sick, and in writings addressing the prayer as a response to the experience of illness, suffering and recovery or death.